SciBLOG

2014-12-29 Bib Cloud

2014-12-29 15:48

I always used a single babel.bib BibTex file to keep a record of all my readings. Great. Then I managed it using a VCS (first SVN, then git). Super great. But at the same time, resources like CiteUlike or Mendeley (but also other services like orcid) allow for cloud-like services of having this data everywhere, anytime. Super super great!

But this fails if you have no connection to internet (remote conference, ...) or more importantly if these services change their policy (mendeley to citeulike sync disappeared at a sudden). The work you provide is not yours. These are mostly commercial services while all the open-source tools are there. Most importantly, the multiplicity of tools makes it difficult to share bibliographic data easily, while if we would have a tool to translate between them this would make it possible (without changing your habits).

As a consequence, I wish to build such a "BibCloud" service with the following features:

bibcloud init : use with biblatex (but a format using bibjson is possible)

CLI coded in python (widespread in the scientific community), all databases + configuration files being stored in plain text files.

it is different from this (question "Workflow for managing references?" [3]) as existing solutions like zotero or do not work for me. I wish to get the pieces of the puzzle together to build a command-line tool for managing bibliographies.

it is different to this question [4] or to this other [5] as they ask more for a GUI solution.